Recommend International Criminal Court Investigation

An immediate investigation is needed into mounting evidence that the Israel Defense Forces launched apparently deliberate attacks against hospitals and health professionals in Gaza, which have left six medics dead, said Amnesty International as it released disturbing testimonies from doctors, nurses, and ambulance personnel working in the area.

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“Even more alarming is the mounting evidence that the Israeli army has targeted health facilities or professionals. Such attacks are absolutely prohibited by international law and would amount to war crimes. They only add to the already compelling argument that the situation should be referred to the International Criminal Court.”

Israeli forces in the southern Gaza town of Khuza’a fired on and killed civilians in apparent violation of the laws of war in several incidents between July 23 and 25, 2014. Deliberate attacks on civilians who are not participating in the fighting are war crimes.

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The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reported that on July 25, a Red Crescent volunteer [the equivalent of the Red Cross] was mortally wounded in an Israeli attack in Khuza’a, and other volunteers who tried to rescue him were fired on. Under the laws of war, medical workers are civilians who may not be targeted for attack.

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Human Rights Watch investigated several incidents between July 23 and 25 when, local residents said, Israeli forces opened fire on civilians trying to flee Khuza’a, but no Palestinian fighters were present at the time and no firefights were taking place.

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“The horrors of war are bad enough for civilians even when all sides abide by the law,” [Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa director] said. “But it’s abhorrent that Israeli forces are making matters even worse by so blatantly violating the laws of war designed to spare civilians.”

Human Rights Watch executive director (and former federal prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York) Kenneth Roth – said:

It was the subject of fairly relentless bombardment. Finally, after a couple of days, on July 23rd through July 25th, families slowly tried to leave Khuza’a for their larger city of Khan Younis nearby, hoping to find refuge there. And as you would do in a situation like this, they raised white flags. They did everything they could to make clear that they were not militants. But on several different occasions, Israeli forces shot at them and actually killed some among the people who were fleeing.

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No matter how many times the Israeli military spokesmen scream, “Human shields! Human shields!” most of the people being killed in Gaza are being killed because Israel is paying insufficient care to saving civilian lives. There’s been case after case in which Israel has used the wrong weaponry or has shot at people with many civilians around. And these, in our view, are war crimes.

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The only real recourse that we see is to the International Criminal Court.

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[The Israeli soldiers] use, for example—The New York Times did an interesting study yesterday—heavy artillery, 155-millimeter artillery, which is utterly inappropriate in a densely populated area, because this kind of artillery is considered accurate if it lands anyplace within a 50-meter radius. You know, you can imagine there are a lot of civilians in that area. It has a fragmentation and blast effect of 300 meters. And nonetheless, Israel lets off barrages of these heavy artilleries. The New York Times documented that yesterday. Or they’ll bring in their air force and simply bomb, even though there are many, many civilians in these areas.

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We’ve gone through this in the prior Gaza efforts. We went through it with the Hezbollah war. I actually, you know, after the Hezbollah war, went and briefed the senior Israeli lawyer for the military, describing many of these same problems, the fact that you can’t just issue a warning and assume that everybody left, in that case, is Hezbollah. So, you know, they are completely on notice. We’ve accused them of this in the past. They just keep repeating it. And it seems to be almost by design to try to make the people of Gaza pay a price because Hamas is ruling over them…. I mean, that’s a war crime logic, and Israel is oftentimes acting according to the same logic in Gaza.

Palestinian civilians killed during the Shuja’iyya massacre of July 20 were deliberately targeted ….

The unofficial reason was to enable the soldiers to take out their frustrations and pain at losing their fellow soldiers on the Palestinian refugees in the neighborhood. Under the pretext of the so-called ‘security threat,’ soldiers were directed to carry out a pre-planned attack of revenge on Palestinian civilians.”

The report disputes Israel’s claim that the Gaza war would have been conducted as a response to rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, saying that at least in part the war was targeted against the “people of Gaza as a whole”. Intimidation against the population was seen as an aim of the war.[70] The report also says that Israel’s military assault on Gaza was designed to “humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability”.[49]

The report focused on 36 cases that it said constituted a representative sample. In 11 of these episodes, it said the Israeli military carried out direct attacks against civilians, including some in which civilians were shot “while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags”.[49] Talking to Bill Moyers Journal, Goldstone said that the committee chose 36 incidents that represented the highest death toll, where there seemed to be little or no military justification for what happened.[71] According to the report, another alleged war crime committed by IDF include “wanton” destruction of food production, water and sewerage facilities; the report also asserts that some attacks, which were supposedly aimed to kill small number of combatants amidst significant numbers of civilians, were disproportionate.[49]

The report concluded that Israel violated the Fourth Geneva Convention by targeting civilians, which it labeled “a grave breach”.[72] It also claimed that the violations were “systematic and deliberate“, which placed the blame in the first place on those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw the operations.[73]

He’s not an obscure blogger for the Times of Israel. He is a luminary of the Likud – a man who got 23 percent of the vote in a contest for the Likud Party leadership. He was appointed to his current high position by Benjamin Netanyahu.

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His strategic goal is to “turn Gaza into Jaffa, a flourishing Israeli city with a minimum number of hostile civilians.” (Modern Jaffa, of course, was built on the ethnic cleansing of most of its Palestinian inhabitants in 1948.)

The statements of Ovadia Yosef, whose recent passing was met with flattering memorials both in Israel and the US, are legendary. The former Chief Rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of many Middle Eastern Jews, said, among other things, that Palestinians “should perish from the world” and that “it is forbidden to be merciful to them”; of non-Jews in general, he declared that “Goyim were born only to serve us.” Despite comments like these, his funeral last October was the largest in the country’s history, with 800,000 Israelis attending. In the past month, Rabbi Noam Perel, head of Bnei Akiva, the largest Jewish religious youth group in the world, called for the mass-murder of Palestinians and for their foreskins to be scalped and brought back as trophies, alluding to an episode in the Book of Samuel; and a Jerusalem city councillor, in charge of security, encouraged a crowd to mimic the Biblical character of Phineas (Pinchas in Hebrew), who murdered a fellow Israelite and his Midianite lover for the “crime” of miscegenation…

One local chief rabbi ruled that bombing Palestinian civilians is permissible, while another, considered a “liberal” by Israeli standards, declared the assault on Gaza to be a holy war mandated by the Torah–one which must be merciless.

We are seeing now that despite the IDF’s impressive fighting, despite the absolute military supremacy, we are in a sort of “strategic tie.” What would have been the right thing to do? We should have declared war against the state of Gaza (rather than against the Hamas organization), and in a war as in a war.

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And we are not merely talking about a hypothetical situation. The grotesque death toll from Gaza is a distillation of this mindset – revealing at best a chilling contempt for Arab life and at worst, with the shelling of schools and shelters, a policy of indiscriminate hatred and revenge. Yes, killing women and children in shelters is about as low as you can get in wartime. As the State Department, in a rare moment of public candor, noted, it is appalling and disgraceful.

Related

From my neutral, non-Jewish perspective which acknowledges the possibility of war crimes commited by either side, it is obvious that this is a one-sided article

Robert Barsocchini

1,500 Palestinian civilians killed. 3 Israeli civilians killed.

That’s 500 to 1. It’s so extreme that it’s completely absurd. Hitler promised to kill 20 of his enemy for every German soldier that was killed.

500 to 1 is unfathomable…

I leave you the last word to go ahead and repeat debunked Israeli-occupier propaganda as necessary, in disrespect of the children killed in this one sided massacre:

john zimmerman

Look at the entire picture: one side firing thousands of rockets located purposely at civilian areas so any response will serve as propaganda, thus placing responsibility on themselves for their civilian deaths. What do you expect Israel to do when fired upon?

Really?? Where’s all the damage to infrastructure, schools hospitals, synagogues government buildings etc etc? Where are all the casualties?

And what civilian areas ?? Nearly every Israeli home has at least one member serving in the military or in the reserve who could be called up for active military duty

Iron Dome’s a failure so don’t even go there. Not one shred of evidence that Iron Dome has knocked any significant number of “rockets” out of the sky. Any civilian casualties that might have been inflicted were prevented by Israel’s early warning system, sheltering, and the pathetic payload of “rockets” from Gaza

And “rockets”? lol Don’t be absurd. More like glorified bottle-rockets. Tiny payloads. They can’t even be aimed.

And let’s be clear here. This is a crucial point since Israel has violated the laws of proportionality. These pathetic “rockets” are NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING compared to the ordinance Israel is using in its Gaza massacre

And why are those rockets being fired? Do you suppose it has anything to do with the illegal cruel blockade/occupation of Gaza by Israel??

It’s called self defense. And the Palestinians in Gaza are entitled to defend themselves against an illegal occupation and blockade

Oh I’m sorry this is Zioworld where self defense is a race based privilege exercised by only Jews and and denied to Palestinians

Btw The US and other states reserve the right to use nuclear weapons for reprisal actions. You Zionists can thank your lucky stars the Palestinians only have pathetic little bottle rockets cuz according to the US and UK and other states’ logic the Palestinians have the right to nuke Israel in retaliation for its illegal blockade and occupation

john zimmerman

Had the Palestinians not tried to destroy Israel, had they not have supported barbarians whose charter includes, ‘Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it,’ which includes sacrificing their children to their idols, your position might might have a leg to stand on. As long as the Palestinians participate in such barbarity Israel needs to contain them as they would any wild animals.

Godzilla

Like greg hunter, another isrealli apologist
puppet. Greg hunter has returned to the dark side where you are from,
eh? How much do they pay you to post dribble and argumentative
horseshirt like this?

Kudos to the intelligent and well informed
rebuttals to your garbage warmonger zio-trash talk. The funny thing
about evil is, it never changes and always offers the same excuses
for murder and kow-towing to their masters agendas. Stupid is…as
stupid does.

Blah to you fool. The rothchild puppet-masters
have pulled your strings well. Same with greg hunter who censors
anyone’s opinion about isreal. Make one doubt his intentions. You all
fall for the divide and conquer methodology and fight each other, as
they plan to kill you all while you scuffle over the purposely
planned and executed distractions towards furthering the crash and
death of America, and moar war with who ever they can pick another
fight with.

Go to isreal if you love them so much and leave
Americans to save thier country from these evil
satanic/racist/evil/zionuts pleaze!

Blah!

.

FredJ11

If anything displays the utter moral and factual bankruptcy of Zionist propaganda/hasbara it is this post by “john zimmerman”

http://bigdanblogger.blogspot.com/ Big Dan

You are WARPED. You make an equivalency of NOBODY DYING from “rockets” vs a nuclear superpower killing 408 children and 1,500 civilians. That is WARPED THINKING.

john zimmerman

All that is warped is your illogic.

Cain Abel

You are a degenerate scumabg.

Carl_Herman

zimmerman: Israel has a hostile military siege on Gaza from land, sea, and air since 2006 that strangles 1.8 million people into poverty, misery, and death.

A military siege is war.

Hamas proposes peace with removal of this unlawful War of Aggression by Israel, and officially rejects terrorism/rockets. The rockets are acts of desperation from people being victims of siege, and with Israel’s history of false flags, could also be paid by Israel to provide “excuse” for hot war.

What do I expect? All people to demand arrests of the War Criminals engaged in war-murders to lawfully stop them.

Cain Abel

You are a fine islamonazi.
I hope they pay you.

purrsun

Neutral, non-Jewish perspective?? You are reading the Script. Yes, the common people of Gaza must be destroyed for harboring a relatively obnoxious political party. Perhaps, that will continue to be justification for getting rid of many other sections of humanity as well. And we’ve plenty of examples of the financing of both sides. Psychopathic power-mongers seem to trump people every time. Just serving up dessert to their Masters??

Stephen Cohen

That is true 500-1 and it is also true that is unfathomable, however that is what WAR is all about. In WAR people die. In War, children and women die. This has happened throughout life on this planet in every war. So what is the big deal?

The real answer is NEVER go to WAR. War is the worse thing that can happen.

http://bigdanblogger.blogspot.com/ Big Dan

You’re doing a “FALSE EQUIVALENCY”, like the U.S. “news” has become. Yeah, it’s the same thing: a nuclear superpower killed 408 children and 1,500 civilians, their ARMY/NAVY/AIR FORCE killed them, too.

And a POLITICAL PARTY (Hamas, which is a creation of Israel btw, look it up), not an army/airforce/navy which they don’t have, killed ZERO Jewish children and 3 civilians.

Yeah, it’s the same on both sides. Right.

Cain Abel

Hello, little nazi.

Abel Cain’t

dang, you left him speechless /s

http://bigdanblogger.blogspot.com/ Big Dan

Anthony Antonello:

Isn’t the argument for Israel is that THEY are the reasonable ones? While Palestine is pegged as “animals” that only want the destruction of Israel? I’ll Bet you didn’t see this on the American media..

While most Americans support Israel without even knowing why.. And admitted and proud Zionists that control the media in America, it is no wonder Americans don’t get to see this side of Israel.